Chapter 146: Grinning

The particles hit.

The two crabs threw their pincers up and crossed them into an X, and the black swarm slammed into the shells and sprayed off in every direction. The sound was like hail on a tin roof. Ninety-one percent, my guess, and I wasn’t often wrong about numbers. Counting was the one thing that kept my head quiet when everything else got loud.

But nine percent got through.

Small black flecks stuck to the crabs’ arms and shoulders, and wherever one landed, the shell went soft and grey like a spreading bruise. Then the grey swelled. Beneath each patch, something was growing. Lumps rose and split and rose again, flesh multiplying on top of flesh until the shell started to crack from the pressure. It was the kind of sight that made you want to look away and made it impossible to.

One crab screamed, a high clicking shriek, and staggered sideways. The other shook its arms as if it could fling the sickness off.

‘Chaos.’

That was Khan’s affinity. It didn’t cut. It made things go wrong from the inside, and the body did the rest. In the Realm, the scariest abilities were never the loud ones. They were the ones that made your own body turn on you.

Khan landed hard on one knee, breathing like he’d run ten miles. His face had gone pale and wet, and his axes trembled in his hands. I had seen him fight for hours without a drop of sweat. This had taken him apart in seconds.

“Khan!” Eva snapped.

“Fine,” he wheezed. “That one costs a lot of spiritual power. And it won’t hold. Go.”

He didn’t sound fine. He sounded like a man holding a door shut with his back.

He was right, though. The lumps on the nearest crab had already stopped growing and were shrinking back. The shells were closing over the damage, and the grey was fading. We had a few seconds, no more.

Eva and Petra charged together.

I had seen them train side by side a hundred times. I had never seen them aim at the same enemy, and the difference was something you felt in your chest.

Eva’s sword went dark. Shadows poured off her feet and climbed the steel until the blade looked dipped in ink. Petra swung her morning star in a slow circle, and the air around the spiked head sagged, as if the whole weapon were pulling the world toward it.

Both crabs raised their pincers to guard.

“Don’t,” Petra said, almost kindly.

She brought the morning star down on the closest one’s claws, and her gravity came down with it. I felt the air press on my shoulders from twenty feet away, like a hand pushing me toward the ground. The pincers, each as big as a door, creaked and then shattered, both at once. Shell the size of dinner plates burst across the stones, and one piece skidded to a stop against my boot.

The crab opened its mouth to scream.

Petra stepped in and drove the spikes into its head.

Once. The shell cracked. She pulled back and swung again, deeper this time. Third. Fourth. Every strike landed with the weight of a boulder, and the ground shook a little with each one. By the fifth, its legs gave out. By the seventh, it was on the ground. By the tenth, there was no head left, only a wet red-brown paste smeared across the dirt.

Petra straightened, breathing hard, green splatter across her cheek.

“Ten,” she said. “I counted.”

She said it the way other people said good morning.

“Please never count out loud again,” Khan croaked from his knee.

Beside her, Eva had the second crab.

It lashed out, but she wasn’t where it struck. She had stepped sideways into the long shadow behind a boulder, and the crab’s own shadow, stretched across the ground, rose up behind it. It wrapped around the creature’s throat and pulled.

The crab froze.

It tore at the shadow with its pincers, but its claws passed straight through, and the shadow only tightened. Its legs buckled. A thin, wet choking noise came out of it, and its black bead eyes bulged. I watched it try to understand what was killing it, and fail.

“Sorry,” Eva said, flat as always. “Nothing personal.”

Her sword came around in one clean stroke.

The head dropped and rolled to a stop at Khan’s boot. He looked at it for a long moment, then pushed it away with two fingers.

The body stood a second longer, held up by the shadow. Then Eva let go and it folded into the dust.

Silence.

My ear had stopped tingling. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and only then noticed how tightly I had been gripping my sword. My fingers ached when I loosened them. I hadn’t struck a single blow.

Four of us. Two Beast level creatures. Maybe thirty seconds, and nobody hurt. In the Realm, that was usually either very good or very bad, and I didn’t yet know which. The mountain above us stayed quiet, as if it was watching how we had done. Somewhere up there, something had just learned we were coming.

‘Show off,’ I thought, at all three of them this time.

Petra wiped her cheek with her sleeve and walked back to the paste that used to be a head. She crouched and poked at it with the tip of her morning star. Something glinted inside, small and round, a stone-like thing shining a faint dull red through the muck.

I looked at the stone, then at her. Of course she had spotted it first. Petra could find a bargain on a battlefield.

Her eyes lit up the way they did at a market, half curious and half hungry.

“Oh,” she said. “I can make it my summon!”

Eva looked at the paste, then at her.

“You crushed it into soup. And now you want a pet?”

Petra only grinned.